Glen Campell dies at 81
Betty MacDonald fan club fans,
Glen Campell died at 81 a year ago.
I adore his songs especially Rhinestone Cowboy and Southern Nights.
Rest in peace, Rhinestone Cowboy!
Peter
Glen Campbell, Whose Hit Songs Bridged Country and Pop, Dies at 81
Glen
Campbell, the sweet-voiced, guitar-picking son of a sharecropper who
became a recording, television and movie star in the 1960s and ’70s,
waged a publicized battle with alcohol and drugs and gave his last
performances while in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, died on
Tuesday in Nashville. He was 81.
Tim Plumley, his publicist, said the cause was Alzheimer’s.
Mr. Campbell revealed that he had the disease in June 2011,
saying it had been diagnosed six months earlier. He also announced that
he was going ahead with a farewell tour later that year in support of
his new album, “Ghost on the Canvas.”
He and his wife, Kimberly Campbell, told People magazine that they
wanted his fans to be aware of his condition if he appeared disoriented
onstage.
What
was envisioned as a five-week tour turned into 151 shows over 15
months. Mr. Campbell’s last performance was in Napa, Calif., on Nov. 30,
2012, and by the spring of 2014 he had moved into a long-term care and
treatment center near Nashville.
Mr.
Campbell released his final studio album, “Adiós,” in June. The album,
which included guest appearances by Willie Nelson, Vince Gill and three
of Mr. Campbell’s children, was recorded after his farewell tour.
That tour and the way he and his family dealt with the sometimes painful progress of his disease were chronicled in a 2014 documentary,
“Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me,” directed by the actor James Keach. Former
President Bill Clinton, a fellow Arkansas native, appears in the film
and praises Mr. Campbell for having the courage to become a public face
of Alzheimer’s.
At
the height of his career, Mr. Campbell was one of the biggest names in
show business, his appeal based not just on his music but also on his
easygoing manner and his apple-cheeked, all-American good looks. From
1969 to 1972 he had his own weekly television show, “The Glen Campbell
Goodtime Hour.” He sold an estimated 45 million records and had numerous
hits on both the pop and country charts. He was inducted into the
Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005.
Decades
after Mr. Campbell recorded his biggest hits — including “Wichita
Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Galveston” (all written by
Jimmy Webb, his frequent collaborator for nearly 40 years) and “Southern Nights” (1977), written by Allen Toussaint,
which went to No. 1 on pop as well as country charts — a resurgence of
interest in older country stars brought him back onto radio stations.
Like
Bobbie Gentry, with whom he recorded two Top 40 duets, and his friend
Roger Miller, Mr. Campbell was a hybrid stylist, a crossover artist at
home in both country and pop music.
“A
change has come over country music lately,” he explained in 1968.
“They’re not shuckin’ it right off the cob anymore. Roger Miller opened a
lot of people’s eyes to the possibilities of country music, and it’s
making more impact now because it’s earthy material, stories and things
that happen to everyday people. I call it ‘people music.’ ”
Glen
Travis Campbell was born on April 22, 1936, about 80 miles southwest of
Little Rock, Ark., between Billstown and Delight, where his father
sharecropped 120 acres of cotton. He was the seventh son in a family of
eight boys and four girls. When he was 4, his father ordered him a
three-quarter-size guitar for $5 from Sears, Roebuck. He was performing
on local radio stations by the time he was 6.
Picking
up music from the radio and his church’s gospel hymns, he “got tired of
looking a mule in the butt,” as Mr. Campbell put it in an interview
with The New York Times in 1968. He quit school at 14 and went to
Albuquerque, where his father’s brother-in-law, Dick Bills, had a band
and was appearing on both radio and television.
After
playing guitar and singing in what he called “fightin’ and dancin’
clubs” in Albuquerque with Mr. Bills’s band, Mr. Campbell moved to Los
Angeles at 22 and in 1960 got a job playing with the Champs, a rock ’n’
roll group best known for its 1958 hit “Tequila.” There were stints with
other, smaller bands, for smaller money.
But
his skills eventually took him into the recording studios as a session
musician, and for six years he provided accompaniment for a host of
famous artists, including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole,
Elvis Presley, Rick Nelson and groups like the Beach Boys and the Mamas
and the Papas.
Although
he never learned to read music, Mr. Campbell was at ease not just on
guitar but also on banjo, mandolin and bass. He wrote in his
autobiography, “Rhinestone Cowboy” (1994) — the title was taken from one
of his biggest hits — that in 1963 alone his playing and singing were
heard on 586 recorded songs.
He
could be a cut-up in recording sessions. “With his humor and energetic
talents, he kept many a record date in stitches as well as fun to do,”
the electric bassist Carol Kaye, who often played alongside Mr.
Campbell, said in an interview in 2011. “Even on some of the most
boring, he’d stand up and sing some off-color country song — we’d almost
have a baby trying not to bust a gut laughing.”
After
playing on many Beach Boys sessions, Mr. Campbell became a touring
member of the band in late 1964, when its leader, Brian Wilson, decided
to leave the road to concentrate on writing and recording. He remained a
Beach Boy into the first few months of 1965.
Mr.
Campbell had made his first records under his own name in the early
1960s, but success eluded him until 1967, shortly after he signed with
Capitol Records, when his recording of John Hartford’s “Gentle on My
Mind” hit the charts. Shortly after that, his version of “By the Time I
Get to Phoenix” reached the Top 40. National recognition, four Grammy
Awards in 1968 and television appearances quickly followed.
After
Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers saw Mr. Campbell on Joey
Bishop’s late-night show in 1968, Mr. Campbell was signed as the host of
the Smothers Brothers’ summer replacement show, whimsically titled
“Summer Brothers Smothers Show.” In his review for The Times, George
Gent called Mr. Campbell “a handsome, talented and relaxed host who
appeared in complete control of some of the crazy goings-on.”
The
success of that show led to his own series, “The Glen Campbell Goodtime
Hour,” which made its debut on CBS in January 1969. It soon became a
hit, despite memos from the front office telling Mr. Campbell to stop
booking so many country stars. (One complaint came after a show that
featured Mr. Campbell, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash.)
Mr.
Campbell had his most famous movie role in 1969, in the original
version of “True Grit.” He had the non-singing part of a Texas Ranger
who joins forces with John Wayne and Kim Darby to hunt down the killer
of Ms. Darby’s father. (Matt Damon had the role in a 2010 remake.) The
next year, Mr. Campbell and the New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath
played ex-Marines in “Norwood,” based on a novel by Charles Portis, the
author of “True Grit.”
Mr.
Campbell made his Las Vegas debut in 1970 and, a year later, performed
at the White House for President Richard M. Nixon and for Queen
Elizabeth II in London.
But
his life in those years had a dark side. “Frankly, it is very hard to
remember things from the 1970s,” he wrote in his autobiography. Though
his recording and touring career was booming, he began drinking heavily
and later started using cocaine. He would annoy his friends by quoting
from the Bible while high. “The public had no idea how I was living,” he
recalled.
In
1980, after his third divorce, he said: “Perhaps I’ve found the secret
for an unhappy private life. Every three years I go and marry a girl who
doesn’t love me, and then she proceeds to take all my money.” That
year, he had a short, tempestuous and very public affair with the singer
Tanya Tucker, who was about half his age.
He
credited his fourth wife, the former Kimberly Woollen, with keeping him
alive and straightening him out — although he would continue to have
occasional relapses for many years. He was arrested in November 2003 in
Phoenix and charged with extreme drunken driving and leaving the scene
of an accident. He pleaded guilty and served 10 nights in jail in 2004.
Ms.
Woollen, who, like Mr. Campbell, was an evangelical Christian, married
him in October 1982. They had both been baptized on a chilly December
day in 1981 in Mr. Campbell’s old swimming hole in Billstown.
Throughout
the 1990s, Mr. Campbell remained influential. He released a series of
gospel albums in the 1990s and in later years made frequent appearances
on evangelical TV shows. In 1992 he began performing in Branson, Mo.,
and in 1994 he opened the Glen Campbell Goodtime Theater there. (The
theater was renamed in the 1990s after he ended his association with
it.)
“Still
in command of his voice and his guitar prowess, he helped launch the
careers of such contemporary country stars as Alan Jackson and Bryan
White in the 1990s,” Robert K. Oermann wrote in “A Century of Country”
(1999).
In
2005, Mr. Campbell and Jimmy Webb performed a program of Mr. Webb’s
songs in New York. Stephen Holden of The Times wrote in his review
that Mr. Campbell’s “sloppiness detracted only minimally from the power
of his voice; at 69, he still conveys the manic optimism of a garrulous
rhinestone cowboy crowing under the open skies.”
He
also continued to record. On his 2008 album, “Meet Glen Campbell,”
seemingly an invitation to a younger audience, he covered songs by U2,
Green Day, John Lennon and others. “Ghost on the Canvas” was released in
2011. “See You There,” containing tracks Mr. Campbell had recorded
informally during the “Ghost” sessions — including stripped-down
versions of many of his old hits — was released two years later. He
entered the studio for the last time after completing his farewell tour
to record the collection of what his daughter Ashley called “his go-to”
songs that became “Adiós.”
In
addition to her and his wife, Mr. Campbell is survived by seven other
children, Debby, Kelli, Travis, Kane, Cal, Shannon and Dillon; three
sisters, Barbara, Sandra and Jane; two brothers, John Wallace and
Gerald, and many grandchildren, great-grandchildren and
great-great-grandchildren. Three of his children were in the band that
backed him on his farewell tour.
Mr.
Campbell often acknowledged his debt to the many songwriters behind his
hits, notably Mr. Webb; he recorded “Reunion: The Songs of Jimmy Webb”
in 1974 and returned to Mr. Webb for the title track to “Still Within
the Sound of My Voice” in 1988. But he also wrote: “I can think of only
two or three songs out of hundreds I’ve recorded that I performed as
originally written. I like to become intimate with the material, and
change it to suit me.”
He
added: “I’ve done the ‘William Tell Overture’ a thousand times on my
live show. That, too, is a challenge, and I don’t think I’ve ever played
it perfectly. If I ever do, fans might grow to expect it that way every
time.”
